I felt truly privileged recently to spend an hour in the company of Steven Gates from Tripod to talk about their latest Christmas album, touring and other interesting stuff. Gatesy was at the other end of the phone line in his kitchen making coffee and after a bit of chit chat where I revealed my age and that I’ve been a huge fan since they began doing gigs at The Prince Patrick Hotel (Melbourne), I asked him how the whole Christmas show tradition started.
Gatesy : We were young & loved Christmas and Christmas carols, so we started putting on our Christmas shows as an excuse to put on a show outside the Comedy Festival. We would get together 3 nights a week for 3 months coming up to Christmas to rehearse and write and organise a one night only Christmas spectacular. It had dancing girls, the pageant and a cast of thousands with our comedy friends. I remember Bob Franklin, when he supported our 1st ever Christmas show and I was so excited about decorating the microphones with colour coded tinsels. I said to him backstage”check it out, microphones, Look! There’s blue tinsel on Scod’s, there’s purple tinsel on my mic and there’s green tinsel on Yon’s! And he said (in his dry manner): “Of Course that’s important”. And, yeah he’s right but it’s fun, we’re just really enthusiastic about it all and we’ve been doing it ever since. We’re touring it around the country now and we can’t have the one off specialness and the cast of thousands any more. But meanwhile over the years we’ve been collecting all these Christmas songs and thought wouldn’t it be great to put them all on a Christmas album?
Tripod are very proud or their new album, which has been gorgeously produced to gently parody an old fashioned family Christmas album. They even filmed the recording which has become a 30 min documentary to be shown on Foxtel’s MAX.
G : The camera’s were rolling the whole time. There were quite a few interesting conversations that had to be edited out because Max is G rated and we were discussing for instance the use of ‘tinselly fucking stuff’ or ‘cock smoking tinsel crap’ in the song “The Homophobic Christmas tree”. I’m just popping some of those snippets up on You Tube.
_ I was amused but a little disturbed to notice on the song “Nothing to see here” you’ve got some little girls singing back up and they actually say “the fucking Lord”. Was that a bit controversial?_
Well we really wanted the Children’s choir that sing elsewhere on the album, ‘The Young Voices of Melbourne’ to sing it originally, but given that a lot of the kids were religious we really couldn’t convince the choir master to do it, but that’s fair enough. So our lovely co producer said “My daughters will do it”. Seriously these little girls were so lovely, they were 8 & 9 and had never said fuck out loud before and their dad was just loving every minute of it. It was a really funny afternoon.
So was their any consideration by you, or pressure from outside, to make this a family friendly album?
The thing is, we’re not and the older we get the less we are going that way. It’s not really for families. We made the album of songs we like and we did them in the way we like them. The whole idea was to re imagine these songs in an old fashioned style so it could sit beside a Dean Martin or Bing Crosby Christmas record so you could put it on at low volumes while you decorate the Christmas tree. Apart from maybe the song “Billy Bragg” and we wondered if it worked with the cohesion of the overall album. [I think it works beautifully, like a modern track such as The Pogues “Fairytale in New York” popping up on a family Christmas album – and it’s hilarious]. We were really wanting to go down the path of making the Final Master sound like an old record.
Have any of you sung in choirs? I’ve noticed there are a couple of lovely short little Madrigal type new songs on the album, ‘Ring Ring Bells’ and ‘A Pauper’s Heart’.
That’s all Yon (he was in in the National Boy’s Choir). Originally we had the premise of doing the whole album as a story set in a car on the way to a Christmas gig and those songs were going to be on the car radio. We lost all of that ridiculous premise, but I really love them and if you are coming to our show those songs will make more sense, we use them as a sort of support act.
So the song ‘Stuffing’; is it as the name suggests a filler? It sounded like it came out of you guys just mucking around in the studio.
It was very much a mucking around thing, it was fun to do.
How did ‘Meet me in the Middle of the Air’ come to be on the album?
Its on there because we love the song and it’s got a great story behind it. We were asked to do this cabaret night that Paul Kelly was putting together at the Speigeltent and we each got to sing our favourite Paul Kelly song, then, I think it was Eddie Perfect’s idea to do this song and he arranged it. It’s his arrangement on the album. We really enjoyed it, so we did it again later on the Sideshow and it got a great response. It’s kind of Christmassy, like ‘Someday the Lord’, not really a Christmas song, but it sounds like a Christmas song.
The opening song ‘O Holy Night’ is a straight out Christmas song. It’s a sweeping orchestral thing but we wanted the audience to get the joke of the album as parody from the beginning. It might be a bit subtle, but we did change it from stereo to a Mono track. That was a huge thing to do to a sound engineer. We wanted it to sound warm rather than hi-fidelic. We made an effort.
It shows and I especially love fabulous 60s sound of “The Only Sheppard”.
Good! Hopefully you can hear that it’s pretty Phil Spector, Yon went to town on the backing vocals for that one. “Fabian’s” like a kind of Leonard Cohen type deal where two of his girlfriends are singing beside him.
I was wondering why, on several of the old songs on the album, only one member of Tripod sings the track? For example “Fabian” which is sung by Yon on this album.
It’s supposed to sound like a Christmas compilation album. If we’d recorded them in the same way we do it on stage then that would just sound like Tripod, when we really wanted to give all the songs a character. We’ve proven that we can sing 3 part harmonies, maybe now its time to choose when we use the 3 part harmonies.
Are you actually parodying specific Christmas songs you know or just styles?
We wanted to work out a style that works best for the song. “Fabian” sound like a beautiful old ‘sit down I’ve got a lesson to teach you’ folk song. It was a bit hard to make a bombastic “Fabian” fit on the album and it was really interesting re-imagining them.
We want to give our audience a different experience each time, but then sometimes the fans are like ‘What the fuck have they done?” – we got that on Middleborough Rd. Hopefully that changes after several listens. Recording gives us that wide scope to explore our musical side, which is really exciting. We probably have the most fun together recording.
People in the recording industry sometimes look down on comedy records. They don’t get it, it’s not ‘just comedy’. it’s a fully produced album with orchestras and fucking woodwind and bands and choirs and stuff. Holy Cow!
I must admit to being a bit taken aback at my first listen of the album. I’m not saying I don’t like it though.
Nup nup, too late…
I’m just saying I was surprised, cause what I wanted from the album was just your Christmas songs collected together. It was a bit weird, at first to hear my favourites done so differently but otherwise I’m really loving it.
Look maybe there’s another Christmas album that we’ll do and we’ll just do it straight down the line, 3 mics & 3 guitars and keep everyone happy. But we figure the Big fans already know the songs backwards, the older songs have been done on other albums, but doing a Tripod Christmas album without them, considering the history of the band, would just be uncool. I put on a specific Dean Martin album when I want to start feeling Christmassy and decorate the tree and I thought it would be great if Tripod had something like that.
Are you going to do the songs in this style live?
The jury is still out on that.
So how has the Christmas show Tour been going?
It would be great if we could film our Christmas show. Its really good. We kicked off our tour in the Speigeltent in front of the Opera House, it was magical. Hopefully the fans are OK with the sticky carpet of the Corner Hotel.
Do you have Christian people getting upset at some of these songs?
There was one guy got upset at our retelling of the 3 Wise Men that is part of our Christmas show. It was actually Scott who came to rehearsal and said I’ve been doing some research on the 3 wise men and they were Zoroastrian / Astrologers who stumbled upon this and they did go to King Herod and told him and were responsible for the killing of the innocents. So I reckon with this guy, it’s just reflex, if you mention God or Jesus, people will instantly have some kind of opinion. It’s like when we did the song called ‘autistic’ we had people come up after our show who had autistic children and say “that’s funny!” It’s interesting watching people’s reactions.
I’ve noticed that though you have referenced Jesus and The Bible many times over the years, taking the mickey and using the odd swear word, you don’t rip the religion to shreds in a nasty way like some comedians do.
I’m not a religious person, but it’s a great story! So it’s worth exploring and people’s faith in God or whatever, that’s their thing. People have asked ‘Are You Christian’ and I’m not, I can’t even begin to believe in a Theistic God, I think I’m Spiritual, yes, I know there is no clear answer, all that sort of stuff that we could go on about for ever. Scott answers “Well we were brought up in a Christian family, we live in a Christian based society.” Also when we do that “Christ is Born” song, it’s a really interesting song to do live because it’s all about the birth of Christ but you can’t get the death part out of your brain and people are very sensitive to that. There’s no actual jokes in that whole song, it’s just an interesting idea. I think we’ve made a discovery that the ones that are Christian, I mean the ones who have intimate relationships with the issues we address, they seem to find it funny, or the Get it, or they like the fact that it’s pointed out, or something. We just want to do the stuff that makes us laugh really.
To move on to other topics, how did you enjoy performing in Canada & the US this year?
Great! In New York we went to the Upright Citizen’s Brigade which was Ace, but it’s an impro theatre and it was pretty disorganised. They didn’t have any of the equipment and stuff we needed so we had to improvise a front of house system and stuff, but the gig was great. We also went to LA and did the Upright Citizen’s Brigade there as well. LA was hilarious and it was brilliant. Three skinnyish gawky white guys checking into the Standard Hotel, which is a really cool Hotel on Sunset Strip. It’s Sunday morning and the foyer is full of rock stars coming down on E and bikini babes walking to the pool. We were trying to keep a brave face. The 3 Geeks being looked up and down by all the beautiful people and not being let in the pool until I produced my room key. It was hilarious. I had a ball in LA. I knew what to expect, I knew it was gonna be trashy. We just did one gig there and then to Singapore
What was that like?
It was alright, we did 5 shows there. We expected to play to all expats, but it was a nice mix of people, we got to tour with Axis of Awesome actually, so that was fun. .
How does Just For Laughs compare with Melbourne Comedy Festival?
It’s purely a showcase, it’s really bizarre, it’s not the kind of way we’ve always gone about it, so it was completely new. We thought of it as a challenge and an interesting concept. You do about 8 or 9 different spots and over the course of those spots you put together your best 12 minutes. The final couple of spots, if you are lucky enough, which we were, are to get you on the Gala which is the televised bit. So we were there for a week and a half and did nine 12 minute spots and drank the rest of the time and had a ball. In terms of going there and getting people to see your stuff, it’s really hard to do that in 12 minutes, especially when you’ve got 4 & ½ minute songs. But what happened over there in Canada, we are yet to find out. We’ve got a bunch of ideas that we want to push and had lots of interest, people wanting to shake our hands and have meetings and stuff. But that’s what they do, it’s their job. It was interesting going over there, mannnn, Flight of the Conchords are huge, god bless them, they’re fucking amazing.
Does that irk you that they appeared at the Melbourne Comedy Festival a few years ago as a cute New Zealand duo with some daggy songs and went out into the world and became these huge stars? Cause though I loved them, I thought you guys were so much better, and it irked me a little.
They went out into the world and they’re fucking talented. When they 1st came Tripod were instant fans, Just their whole style and they’re cool! They’re really cool. But Overseas the amount of people who introduced us as 3 guys from New Zealand, it was hilarious, because every music comedy act now is from New Zealand. I think it’s a funny part of Flight of the Conchord’s joke, but maybe the world is more open to musical comedy.
Maybe they’ve opened doors?
Maybe they have. They’ve certainly proved something that no one has proved before; that musical comedy can sell a shit load of records. They are primarily musicians as well and they translated their material incredibly well. As soon as I saw the TV show, I loved it, it’s glorious, they’re true to their style and they’ve got such an incredibly unique angle and always have had. We’re just massive fans of them in fact.
Do you have any exciting new projects in the pipeline?
We’re working on an Opera. We bumped into an old friend of ours who is now a renown conductor and he said ‘You should do an orchestra show’. The initial suggestion was to do what people like Ben Folds have done, perform our songs with an orchestra, I think the Scared Weird Little Guys have done something like that too. But the whole thing evolved into a whole new opera with a Dungeons and Dragons theme.
Oh Wow!
Using the characters from our website. We’re making a story out of that. We’re in talks with orchestras, but these things apparently take ages so it might not be happening til 2010. Meanwhile we’ve worked on a Cartoon show, we did the music and some of the voicings for the characters., it’s called “Exchange Student Zero”. Apart from that it’s this Christmas album and show and next year is open.
‘For the Love of God’ is out now through Liberation. The Xmas tour continues to wind it’s way around its way around Australia visiting Melbourne (4/12), Moorooduc (Vic, 5/12), Adelaide (10/12), Castlemaine (12/12), Perth (17 & 18/12) and Cairns (22/12). See our gig guide for details.
Many thanks to Steven Gates.